Archive for August 31, 2009

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As a software development company, we mostly work on client projects. Occasionally one project doesn’t start right when another ends. In that short interval, we would like to work on something useful — in house products, R&D projects, etc.. Unfortunately, we can’t run these “bench” projects the way we run a normal project. We can’t do two or even one week iterations, because some folks may only be on the bench for a few days. So, how do you apply these resources efficiently? Here are a few

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Eric Smith from 8th light gave a hands-on TDD presentation at last night’s Chiphone meeting, hosted at Obtiva’s downtown office, (conveniently located near the the train).

There was a good crowd of people, most attendees have ‘played around’ with iphone development, 4 have actively developed apps (3 people have live apps in the store). From my quick survey of those that have submitted apps, it seems most of them were free utility apps or simple games, with at least one commercial app Dash for Confluence. It also seemed that no one had

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To make a cheap joke and paraphrase a common quote, web developers and web designers are two groups separated by common languages. In our case, the languages are HTML and CSS, which are the output of both the web design process and the web development process. Developers and designers produce their HTML/CSS in different ways and with different goals. Here are some ideas for bridging the gap so that the developers and designers on your team can work together smoothly.

Designers and developers obviously have different goals for their HTML —

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On seeing that someone had developed a Grails Plugin for Vaadin (the former ITMill Toolkit, based on GWT as a front end technology), I immediately grabbed it and started exploring. One of the first things I do when developing things that look like GUI’s is apply PureMVC to it. It’s sort of like a big MVC switchboard that lets you hook together the smaller MVC’s of whatever framework you’re using. Overkill for really simple applications. Crucial for big ones.

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Mocha is the mocking library used by the Rails team, so it has understandably gained some traction among Rails developers. I have started using it over flexmock lately, but ran into some problems with partial mocks on ActiveRecord objects. The problem stemmed from the fact that ActiveRecord instantiates new records when returning records from finders, which meant that creating partial mocks for a particular record was difficult.

I created a helper method to make this easier, and so far it has cleaned up a bit of my

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One thing about agile teams is that they constantly strive to get better. In my experience an Agile team takes 2-4 iterations to work through the forming stage. By iteration 10 or so the team is past forming and storming and is well into norming. At this stage the team is often moving fast enough or better than expected for the business’ needs. Now the team faces a dilemma: How to become a high performance team and why.

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All the good stories in agile software development start “three manufacturing efficiency experts walk into a bar…” But seriously, I think it’s clear that software development has a greater affinity to manufacturing than to construction. So, its good to see the Lean and manufacturing folks get a little blog buzz over at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com with Jack Milunky’s post The 7 Software Development Wastes – Lean series Part 5 – Motion:

Waste #5 in manufacturing is defined as Motion. And motion can be compared to “task switching” in Software Development – as

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I’m approached by people every week that think they have a great “new” idea for a web startup. The ideas run the gamut from those that aren’t yet technologically possible to those “new” ideas that I have received 10 similar calls on over the past year. Here are some things to consider:

Think about the business need and revenue model first. Who are the users (your “customers”), what is the application or service worth to them, how many of them are there, etc. If you can’t envision generating a million dollars